"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.

April 02, 2010

This has never been a confessional blog. It can verge on poetry, turning with sharp eye and quick witted tongue to the forgotten sides of a story, but it is not a place where I have chosen to share the things that unsettle me and keep me off balance. I am one who turns the inward focus outward, recasts the personal as universal. I go into my head, away from my heart. I show what I want you to see.

Ah, but that is really an untenable position for a writer (and one who writes in a public forum, no less). And though I have been resisting it for a number of months now, I find there is more to share. Though it frightens me to go to this place with you, on this Good Friday with every bud bursting with new life I find that I can.

My marriage of 14+ years (and a relationship since 1991) has sadly,
inescapably, run its course. It is coming down around me like hard
rain
outside my window. Much still remains between us - affection and care
and fierce loyalty to our children - but there is no getting around the fact that our love is gone and she no
longer wishes to be my wife. How empty that feels, not to be able to set things right as is my natural
inclination. To have to be my own redeemer.

And yet the longer I live with it (and I have been living with this knowledge for many months now), the more I come to feel that it is the right choice, even if one I never would have had the courage to initiate. My default has been to settle for less out of fear of losing more, and fear of middle age (for I turn 42 in a week's time), of admitting that what began with such hope and expectation has been a mistake, and of being isolated and alone.

This is no Gordian knot that a sharp legal ax can sever -
we are going slowly, slowly, toward a time when we can afford to have
separate places to live and continue to share parenting. It will not happen this year, but it will happen the next.

Our home life proceeds
much as before - the children mercifully unaware as yet of what we are planning - and working together with counselors has actually given us the skills to be together now, in this transition, that at an earlier time might have sustained our marriage. But at night we go our separate ways (she to the bedroom we once shared
on the floor above, me to a futon couch on the floor below). We will do this
for the foreseeable future while she seeks the additional training and
paid work that will allow us to disentangle and move on to separate households and whatever
our altered lives may bring.

Like Spring, I took my marriage on faith, but like a fool who plants the
seed and neglects the garden it withered on the vine. Did it slip like
the ring from my finger, or did I withdraw my hand as from a dog that
snapped, singe my wings on a maddening flame? I knew at some
fundamental level where this was leading, years and years ago, and
refused to accept it as possible.

Mine will be the first divorce in my
family, among my aunts and uncles and cousins of the first degree,
though the pressure to stay came from me alone. I bore up and took on greater burdens these many years, and added my own measure of salt to the soil,
but I am still reckoning the cost in spirit. And I am lonely,
and my faith in myself - let alone a feeling as vital and frightening as
love - is often hard to keep in view.

When she and I met in Africa, we discovered a shared
love of birds, but my eagle eyes and open stride far out-ranged her
own. Then malaria
sapped her stamina, her lungs filled with pollen, our first child was born still and she fell further
behind. She turned instead to the growing things that stayed in place,
content to observe what lay by the path rather than seeking the next
bend in the trail. She taught me to see the quiet glory of the smallest
flower, the riversmooth stones and the drones of bees. She told me my
head was in the treetops, while her eyes were on the simple things below
that others overlooked. I preferred to think of it as me giving our marriage high beams and she low, but they got sadly misaligned along the way.

We had
other children who found a wilderness of discovery in our small backyard, who
began by short rambles before scrambling up mountainsides. They offered
me fresh eyes, soaking up my woods lore and stories unfolding in every
found moment. They became my companions in the
natural world, while my wife seemed content to stay inside. Yet she
yearned to be present for the firsts in their lives. She could not bear
to sit reading on the deck by the cove while we hiked to the cliffs on
the far side of the island and so that place was lost to her. Life pressed down, containing that
sparkle that had captivated my heart. I felt it, and recoiled, and the
distance widened.

In the first months of this new transition, I wasn't sure that I would tap the backyard maple tree at all this year. I didn't know
if I would still be in this house, or whether I would be alone. I am grateful for the meager output of sap I was able to reduce to syrup this disappointing year. I expended more energy in boiling
than the monetary value of the product of my labor, but that is not the
right calculus. Each ringing drop in a galvanized pail said to me " here we are...in this moment." I was the only one outside to
hear it, and I remembered that when my son Elias was learning to speak his
first observations included; "Bucket, drip, drip, drip."

Now I
am planning a garden and know that while my divorce is a certainty the
timing is at least a year away. So I imagine spading the earth, working
in compost provided from a neighbor's dairy herd. I think about the
seeds my children and I will press into the soil, laying out hopeful
rows for bright, growing things. I think about where to
transplant tomatoes in hope that the late blight doesn't return, and
dream of salsa and gazpacho and heavy fruit on the vine. Anything is possible before you begin.

That is
all still
weeks away, of course. We can get killing frosts in late May. But
the propagative urge is strong in Spring, and it overrides the hard fact
that harvests and marriages fail. Life's slow
accumulations will bend your back and overfill your cup. What we prune
away and what we carry forward can lighten a buried heart. But still I
miss the human touch, the mature feelings once had for each other
alongside the fierce and sacrificial love of parent for child.

So much for me now is about letting things in. I write with these
highly sensory words - plangent, tactile, alliterative - turning them
over on my tongue to taste the sour and sweet. I do this, just now,
because I am detached from sensory acts of touch and shared exploration
in a sexual sense, but more specifically because in matters of the heart
and spirit I go into my head. I stand watch, and wary of what I feel,
of what feelings are directed my way. I do this while appearing
outgoing, for I am not shy, but vulnerable. I feel fiercely, but I
do not trust the raw emotion in me or those I am close to. Too
volatile, too unpredictable. Too much learned long ago. This
may explain why I write poetic prose - that, and a love of language and
wordcraft.

Something is giving way, now, like pelvic bones
parting in the passage of birth. Like a clot of blood, root split
rock, blue ice calving from the face of the glacier. Will lungs clear,
or will parts shear away that have withered from long neglect? Will
love be the ghost limb that aches at the stump? Will there be quietness
with the cleaving, something new that remains? Will I take her arm some day at
other weddings, too well known to wonder whether the passing years have
been kind to us, or cruel?

I don't know, and I won't know until I come to those places that cleanse or further clarify. But I am aware, and present, and letting the wind blow through my open door. I have all the big questions and all the doubts but I am here in the stream, head above water, not standing on the bank of that dark river. Even though I tread water I do not stay in place. Maybe my destination is the far side, or maybe I will fetch up at some landing downstream or even somewhere across the bar out in that bright salt water.

Anything is possible at the beginning, and life is full of beginnings.

"One door opens, another shuts behindOne sun sets and another sun she
risesLove comes to you in old familiar waysLove comes to you in
shadows and disguises"

February 26, 2010

It has been a considerable while since I last heard Richard Thompson strap on an electric guitar and blister through his back catalog with his band. At the shows I have attended in the last few years, he has tended either to have been touring solo and acoustic or in his "1000 years of popular music" incarnation with Debra Dobkin and Judith Owen. Indeed, he has another upcoming round in April double billed with Loudon Wainwright III as Loud and Rich.

But last night at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, the Richard Thompson Band wrapped up a three night stand and final night of a brief, West Coast recording tour of brand new material with a second set of his previous work. I managed to make my way from the East Coast to the West to take it all in.

The band was in top form, with mainstay drummer Michael Jerome and polyinstrumental Peter Zorn blowing horns and playing rhythm joined by Joel Zifkin on violin and Taras Prodaniuk on bass. Thompson is a generous front man, perhaps because he has also done extensive session work, and knows how to feature his talented fellow musicians without sucking the wind out of the performance by his own massive talent.

There are some songs in the Thompson cannon that really open up with a full band. Highlights from the second set included a monstrous jam on "Tear Stained Letter", the dance hall classic "Al Bowley's in Heaven" that fit the band in this grand old room like a pair of evening gloves, and an encore of "I Wanna See the Bright Lights Tonight" that rolled around the floor in glorious excess. There were also surprises, like leading off the set with "Time Will Show the Wiser" from his youthful days with the Fairport Convention, "Can't Win" from 1988's Amnesia, and the choice of "Wall of Death" from the classic Shoot Out the Lights album with ex wife Linda Thompson.

The audience seemed to appreciate that they were part of something unusual, as there was little shouting out of requests as is more typical of his solo shows. I did not hear a single complaint that audience favorite "52 Vincent Black Lighting" did not get its customary airing - there had been too much ear candy in an evening that went nearly three hours.

The first set featured 13 songs of previously unrecorded new material. The only one I had heard before was called (I believe) "A Brother Slips Away", written after the deaths of three old friends. A Thompson ballad can just as easily be of the murder variety as of the tattered heart sort, and there were songs that came from both places in the new recordings. Thompson's deliciously over the top audience banter helped set the crowd up for the unfamiliar songs, a few of which let him and the other band members really open up and explore the boundaries though this was more in evidence during the second set.

I had the great pleasure of taking an old friend to see Richard Thompson for the first time at this concert and his wide eyed response as we left the theater was "I have a lot of catching up to do." I hope that the live album that results from this tour features both sets, the old and new, bookends of an exceptionally fine evening.

October 05, 2009

I took in back-to-back shows this weekend by Loudon Wainright III and Richard Thompson, who are touring North America together this Fall as "Loud and Rich." This is the first time since my Deadhead days I have followed musicians from one gig to the next, and it afforded me the chance to see how this combo was shaping up and especially to spoil myself by listening to Richard Thompson two nights in a row. I swear, I could happily do that for a week of Sundays, even if he stuck to the same set list. The things he can do with a guitar never fail to astonish.

These two old friends are an intriguing pairing. They both share a
merciless wit, with clear affection for novelty songs and dark humor.
Thompson produced a couple of Wainwright's albums and Loudon has covered some of Thompson's songs. They both have folk roots and they both have maintained a loyal fan base for about 40 years. They clearly get along, and that was particularly evident in some of the songs they did together. Otherwise, they are very different musicians. Wainwright is a
shoot-from-the-hip kind of performer, whereas Thompson has a smoother
delivery, spot on timing and far superior technique. They may have had equal billing, but any other performer with Loudon's skills would have merely been the opening act.

Loud and Rich played the Flynn Theater in Burlington Vermont on October
3rd, and Harvard's Sanders Theater in Cambridge, MA on the 4th. The format of the
tour has Loudon playing for about an hour, to be joined by Thompson for a pair of
songs and then wrapping up with one more on his own. After intermission, Thompson takes the stage for an hour, with Loudon coming back for two encores together (the first Thompson's choice, the second one Loudon's). With the exception of "Down Where the Drunkards Roll" - done as a duet as the first encore on both nights - the other songs they performed together were different each time. The best was a raucous rendition in Cambridge of the R&B classic "Smokey Joe's Cafe", which suited their styles really well, and featured Thompson's over the top delivery of Smokey Joe's warning - in a Scottish brogue, no less - "You better eat up all your beans, boy and clear right on out."

I understand now why restaurant critics make two visits before submitting their reviews, because the Flynn show had some unfortunate "presentation issues", particularly in Loudon's uneven opening set, that were fortunately nowhere in evidence the next night. Anyone, particularly a guitarist who plays his ax as savagely as Wainwright, can break a guitar string. Loudon broke two, without a technician to swap out instruments, and forgot the words to some of his new songs on more than one occasion. Even RT was not immune to whatever bad karma was in the air, as he unintentionally disconnected in the closing bars of 52 Vincent Black Lightning (the horror!). To his credit, Wainwright had his game fully on at the Cambridge show. The first nights of this kind of tour are essentially the shakedown cruise, anyway.

Wainwright had a piano on stage in Burlington and pulled out "Red Guitar" and "Another Song in C", which managed to pull the heartstrings at one moment and dip into self-referential mockery the next. He didn't bring his banjo, alas. He featured a number of songs from his last two albums and some that haven't even made it to disc yet. I admit that since one of these - Recovery - consists of revisiting songs from his back catalog, I was hoping for a few more old chestnuts. "Dead Skunk"? "Swimming Song"? "Clockwork Chartreuse"? No matter. Always alert to topics and trends ripe for exploitation in song, Wainwright has several "for the New Depression", including "Cash For Clunkers", a crowd favorite that Loudon wisely decided to lead off with the second night. Wainwright was game to shuffle his set list from night to night, which bodes well for the tour as he adapts to crowd response.

Thompson gave strong performances on both nights. I was blessed with very close seats in both theaters. The guitarists in the audience - including my wife for the Burlington show - were universally gobsmacked by his picking and fretwork. I've seen him perform live often enough in the last few years to start to notice how even songs that seem to be in regular rotation evolve as he plays, and especially the way he sings them. He positively growls the line "to ride" in 52 Vincent Black Lightning like the pipes of James Adie's motorbike, and the way he ratchets up the vocal crescendos of Crawl Back (Under My Stone) - the closing song of the second set on both nights - left me and everyone else in the hall as delirious as the roiling chords that wail in waves from that guitar like it were a fully loaded Strat instead of acoustic.

Thompson's set during the Flynn Show stuck to a list that included a haunting rendition of "Persuasion" and a foray into the acoustic material from the mid 90's album You? Me? Us?, from which he selected both "Cold Kisses" and (surprisingly) "Woods of Darney". Richard has a new lament in his repertoire to go with three recent losses - with the chorus "A Brother Slips Away" - that I hope makes it into his next album. He did great renditions of "I Wanna See the Bright Lights Tonight" each show, dropping an hilarious aside during the second performance that the original LP featured the misprinted lyric "a couple of drunken knights rolling around on the floor" that would have made ol' Sigmund proud.

RT seems to favor some of his more recent work more than others in performance. He knows that "52 Vincent Black Lightning" is the one song we all must have and very kindly obliges us every time. He featured three songs from "Sweet Warrior" in Burlington that I heard him do last year in Great Barrington: "Johnny's Far Away", "Dad's Gonna Kill Me" and "Sunset Song", which last has the potential to be another audience favorite in the same vein as "Beeswing". However, the songs from his 2005 "all acoustic" Front Parlor Ballads appear destined for obscurity and rarely get an airing.

The second set in Cambridge followed the same list as the night before until the audience started calling out requests. So near the end, with Thompson declaring he was "putty in our hands", he obliged by playing "Bathsheba Smiles", "Beeswing" and "From Galway to Graceland". On this night with things breaking their way and all that good energy in the hall, I would have loved to have heard another song or two with Loud and Rich together. God knows what they would have decided to play next. Maybe something by Plastic Bertrand. Thompson has that covered.

All in all I was pleased to have attended both concerts. A bit of a novelty act, something of an experiment, it was great fun to watch and hear. My cousins in Charlottesville should make every effort to catch Loud and Rich when they roll into town, and RT has a solo gig coming up in Princeton, too, so my kin in Jersey have an appointment to keep.

June 24, 2009

Is anyone else besides me disappointed that the staff of the faithless Governor of South Carolina lied ? He did not, as his aides incorrectly reported, take off on his own for a few days on the Appalachian Trail. When Governor Mark Sanford ditched his responsibilites, his family and all means of communication, the idea that he had strapped on his pack and headed for the wilderness had a certain appeal. Who wouldn't want to shed the weight of executive power for a few days in the mountains without cell phones, without Twitter, without minders and the sleaze of politics and exchange all of this for the rejuvenation that this national treasure affords?

To find out that instead he was betraying his marriage vows in Argentina along with the public trust is a far more believable, if pathetic, explaination. This is hardly the "exotic" experience the Governor claims to have been seeking, but commonplace, tawdy, and utterly lacking in originality. And for his staff to lie about his unexplained absense by claiming the Governor was behaving just like the 4 million people who enjoy the glories of the Appalachian Trail every year is an insult to them and to this great American natural resource.

Never mind that infidelity is also commonplace in America, or that those politicians like Sandford with his feet of clay espousing family values are particularly craven. There was no need to sully the AT along with his family, his reputation, and the public trust. His professed love of the AT has nothing at all to do with his love of a woman in Buenos Aires. It is also telling that the trail, over 2,300 miles long, does not include a single section within South Carolina.

If Governor Sandford had walked out the door last Thursday, stopped in to the local sporting goods store for a rucksack, some beef jerky and a pup tent and disappeared up the spine of the eastern highlands instead of down to his Andean mistress, he might have been a sympathetic, if troubled figure. If he had packed his rags and gone down the hill, to paraphrase a great breakup song by Richard Thompson, he might have been a failure and a disappointment but he would have been an honest one. If he had shacked up in an AT lean to on some windswept mountainside, I would not be grinding this ax, but he didn't and his staff knew it and they lied, so now he's just another dishonest pol with his hand in the honey pot and they all need to take a hike.

June 14, 2009

In a fit of focused cleaning - the sort that fails to declutter the house but puts one portion of it in perfect order - I came upon a cassette I had made for Emily before she was born. The date is March 15, 2000, and if I felt brave or hopeful enough at that stage in Viv's pregnancy, having lost our first child in stillbirth the year before, it must have been around the time of the level 2 ultrasound that showed nothing amiss this time around.

This was in the pre-download, late analog era when people still made tapes of their favorite music to share with their friends. I was a decade out of college (4 years since graduate school), and much of the new music I was exposed to at this time came from tapes sent to me while we were in Africa. I still had my vinyl out, and piles of hissing cassettes, and it was here that I went to make a tape for my baby, anticipating sharing a life of song and music from the first day onward. Both Emily and Elias love music and are growing up in a family that sings.

So what did I put on this tape for my unborn daughter? The title is also the name of an improvised composition by my old friends Theo and Charlie, part of a jam session from our boarding school days when Charlie had an in room suspension for some last minute holiday schnapps consumption on the way back to school (as did I, but that is not part of this story). Some of the music might be construed as lullabies, but certainly not all for there is also Morphine's "You Look Like Rain" and Hendrix doing "The Wind Cried Mary".

Loudon Wainwright III opened the 1st set with "Swimming Song" , with "B-Side" on the other side, naturally. Bob Dylan played "Froggie Went a Courting" and Dianne Ferris covered a soulful "Blackbird ." Nancy Griffith's version of "Boots of Spanish Leather" and the Indigo Girls "Watershed" are the sort of songs I might have sung at bedtime; when Emily was two, she knew all the words to "Rocky Raccoon" thanks to her Daddy's nightly crooning. I slipped in the Cowboy Junkies doing "I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry", and Laura Love doing a raunchy "Clap Hand", but it turns out that Lyle Lovett's "If I had a Boat" has the controversial lyrics that have prompted recent family discussions of what can be sung in place of the delightful line "Kiss my a** I've bought a boat I'm going out to sea." Well, in France they serve their children wine with dinner. I expose mine to Richard Thompson and murder ballads.

The most pleasent rediscovery on this compilation is Elvis Costello's "Clown Strike " from the 1994 album Brutal Youth. The lyrics are marvelously inventive:

And it's pandemoniumFor the humble and the mightyYou don't have to tumble for meEven a clown knows when to strike

Tell me what you want of meOr are you terrified of failure?You put on a superstitious faceBehind all this paraphernaliaWe're not living in a masqueradeWhere you only have three wishesIt isn't easy to seeIn a lifetime of mistaken kisses

But there's one thing that I had to keep insideBecause I was shakingWhy don't you get some prideThere was a clown strikeAnd the clowns threw down their toolsBut you don't have to play so hardAnd I'm nobody's foolYou don't have to go so far'Cause I love you as you are

Going back to the vaults, 9 years and a few months more, I remember the man I was then and the father I hoped to be. Pandemonium for the humble and the mighty, but sweet as summer wine.

May 04, 2009

This is, hands down, the concert tour you do not want to miss this year.

"Richard Thompson and Loudon Wainwright III, long time friends and collaborators commence their first ever North American tour together for the 2009 / 2010 season. While they have performed and recorded together intermittently over the years, this will be their first full scale North American tour together. Be prepared for a once in a lifetime concert event when they join forces on the same bill."

April 24, 2009

I'm not altogether sure I want to know what it says about me that on a gorgeous day without a cloud in the sky, I have murder ballads running through my head. Yesterday's electric folk post may have gotten me started, and the truth is that some very fine music has been made that is steeped in lyric gore. This is especially true of those traditional songs that come from northern Europe, and those bluidy Scots and Scandis whose folk songs often tell of vengeful revenants and cruel mothers. Cleaned up and taken out in polite company, such stuff went gold for the Kingston Trio and lauched the modern folk movement.

There are many songs, not strictly in folk ballad form, which could rightly fall in the genre. Some of them are elevated to exquisite heights by one particular performance. Others are simply classic no matter who does them.

Here are my picks for the top Ten Murder Ballads, based on one or the other of these criteria. No doubt you could add a few of your own, as indeed I struggled mightily over which would make the cut (and cleverly stretched to fit in an eleventh, as you shall see).

"Down By The River" Neil Young This one often gets drawn out into an extended jam in live performance.

Be on my sideI'll be on your sideThere is no reasonfor you to hideIt's so hard stayinghere all aloneYou could be takingme for a rideShe could drag meover the rainbowSend me away...

"Hey Joe" The Jimmi Hendrix Experience made it a classic.

I'm goin' way down south, way down southWay down to Mexico way, yeahI'm goin' way down south, way down south, babyWay down where I can be free

Ain't no one gonna mess with me there, babyAin't no hang-man gonnaHe ain't gonna put a rope, a rope around me, yeah

"Crazy Man Michael" Dave Swarbrick/Richard Thompson. Richard wrote the lyrics for a traditional tune that was later replaced by a new one of Dave's composing.

O where is the raven that I struck down deadAnd here did lie on the ground oI see that my true love with a wound so redWhere her lover’s heart it did pound o

"Matty Groves", traditional, arranged by Fairport Convention: A lady seduces her servant, and taunts her husband who slays them both:

"A grave, a grave!'' Lord Darnell cried, "to put these lovers in.But bury my lady at the top for she was of noble kin."

"Pretty Polly" various. Joan Baez did a classic rendition, and another by Hilary Burhan was used in the closing credits of an episode of HBO's "Deadwood". It is related to many older ballads, including Childe #90, and the best melange of these is another arrangement by Broadside Electric entitled Jellon Grame:

"Lie you there, oh father dearMy mother's curse to rueThe place that she lies buried inIs far too good for you."

"Tom Dooley " The Kingston Trio. The one that got the ball rolling in the late 1950s. My aunt learned this song while in college around this time and it is a standard at family sing alongs.

"Bruton Town" various artists. I am partial to the 1972 Sandy Denny version, as wel as that by Broadside Electric on their album "With Teeth":

"Now welcome home, my dear young brothers,Our serving man, is he behind?""We've left him where we've been a-hunting,"We've left him where no man can find."

"Childe Owlet": Childe #291 performed by Steeleye Span. This one breaks all the rules. A man is condemned by false witness to be torn apart by horses because he spurns the advances of his kinsman's wife, who gets away with it.

Lady Erskine sits intae her bowerA-sowing a silken seamA bonny shirt for Child OwletAs he goes out and inHis face was fair, long was his hairShe's called him to come near“Oh, you must cuckold Lord RonaldFor all his lands and gear.”

"Where the Wild Roses Grow" Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, from an album of nothing but Murder Ballads:

On the third day he took me to the riverHe showed me the roses and we kissedAnd the last thing I heard was a muttered wordAs he stood smiling above me with a rock in his fist

April 23, 2009

Electric folk is one of those musical genres that either rocks your boat or leaves you cold. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring, it does not conform to any neat musical category - which, of course, is part of its appeal. Ever since Bob Dylan pulled out the stops and went electric at Newport in '65, old standards have been getting fresh airings with sometimes revolutionary effects.

Consider that paragon of heavy metal bands, the incomparable Led Zepellin, which is often credited for the lengths it has taken blues standards. It should also be acknowledged among the innovators of electric folk. Zepellin III includes the song Gallow's Pole, which they may have discovered as a Leadbelly recording but which is has deep traditional roots.

It is the fourth album, however, that cements the link between Zep and Britain's electric folk pioneers. The Battle of Evermore, in which Jimmy Page picks up an unfamiliar mandolin and frenetically noodles his way into a howling ballad, also features the vocals of Sandy Denny: the only woman to ever get a singing credit on a Led Zepellin album (she got her own symbol on the album sleeve, which from the Zep was quite a hat tip). Robert Plant has a longstanding interest in electric folk, and not just in the Anglo tradition, for he is a staunch supporter of the electric Tuareg band Tinariwen that rocks out in the Mali sands. He also clearly has a sense of humor, being a fan of the marvelously offbeat Dread Zepellin, but I digress.

Sandy Denny had a seminal influence on the electric folk genre, bringing a repertoire of traditional British and celtic music to her work with the groundbreaking Fairport Convention. Fairport alum Richard Thompson is one of the hardest rocking folkies in the business (if indeed any such label can apply to his fretwork and compositions). Fairport's Cropredy Convention is one of those grand, three day festivals which should be on my list of pilgimages to make, perhaps on the way to Canterbury, before we finally meet on the ledge. Then there is the lesser known but greatly accomplished Broadside Electric, the Philadelphia based elctric folk band which features my college friend Tom Rhoads on guitar and vocals.

One of the things that appeals to me about this music is that it frequently makes use of the Childe Ballads and can therefore be counted on for a good dose of revenge and bad ends. Notable examples can be found in Fairport's Sir Patrick Spens and Matty Groves. Broadside Electric credits Childe Ballads for making their album More Bad News their "second most gory." Who says folk music is all about where all the flowers have gone? Let's have some Daisy Mayhem!

Some folk instruments become completely different beasts when electrified. The fiddle is perhaps formost of these, wailing like a banshee or leaping like St. Elmo's Fire. Folk also allows for unusual time signatures that get an extra lurch when amplified. This was also one of Led Zepellin's fortes, though I'm pretty sure Black Dog, whether or not there is a call and response going on, owes little else to any traditional folk music. One of my favorite Broadside Electric songs - The Gardener - has a nice broken time signature at the climax (and is also a Childe Ballad).

So were the Vandals given the keys to the city? Or would the "folk", ever resourceful and not given to standing on ceremony, have plugged in if they were able? I'm with Duke Ellington, here: "If it sounds good, it IS good!"

October 26, 2008

The only thing which could have improved the Richard Thompson concert we heard at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, Massachusetts last night would have been if we had also been blessed with tickets for the show he did the night before at the Egg in Albany, a venue where we saw him perform his 1,000 Years of Popular Music repertoire in 2004. This performance was a make up engagement, since he was forced to cancel his shows last April after suffering a scorpion sting on the hand. Thompson acknowledged the incident early on by observing that the investment the audience had made in tickets six months ago was probably the only investment in their portfolios now to have retained any value. With that, we were off to the races.

Richard Thompson makes a guitar skip and sparkle like the prancing imp in his eye. He can induce it to croon and scream with tender regret or burning outrage, with lyrics that alternately lacerate and caress. His virtuoso fretwork is nothing less than jaw dropping. My wife always watches his hands, and said he often had three different picking routines going simultaneously, which another reviewer of Thompson's music confirms here. He can make an acoustic guitar sound like skirling pipes or launch into an arena-worthy rock out.

With more than 40 albums worth of recorded material to draw from, and a willingness to toss in a cover request from time to time, a Richard Thompson solo concert is brimming with familiar and unexpected pleasures. Last night at the Mahaiwe, he lead off with I feel So Good and then played Walking on a Wire, which was the song that set the hook for me back in my 19th year. After that, a new song like Time's Gonna Break You held its own with early gems like The Great Valerio, I Wanna See the Bright Lights Tonight, and Devonside. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, which is for Thompson fans what his song Meet on the Ledge is for Fairport Convention, came earlier in the evening that I expected, and the half dozen or so encores included requests for Valerie, Galway to Graceland and a devastating Shoot out the Lights.

Thompson closed with A Heart Needs a Home, which left me delirous with almost post-coital satisfaction. It was that good. When we stepped out into the rain - we dancing mortals released from the faerie ring - our cheeks hurt from a year's worth of smiling. And I'm-a wait, wait, waiting for the next time...

October 25, 2008

This rarely happens in my life anymore, but tonight Viv and I have a night out on the town. The sitter is set, there are funds for a good dinner in one of Great Barrington's many fine eating establishments, and at 8:00 p.m. the curtain goes up at the Mahaiwe on Richard Thompson's make up performance for the show he had to cancel back in April after being bitten by a scorpion. Hard to imagine a nicer way to spend the evening.

And anyone who can make a Britney Spears song sound like a classic is a man after my own heart.